making live music with free software
Just stumbled upon another database of audio files under Creative Common Licenses: ccMixter. Amazing! It collects finished remixes on one hand and material to remix on the other. Instrumental tracks, drum loops, voices and the like. They can be searched by tags or filtered by BPM. A “How I did it” tab in the extras section some artists describe what tools, processes and/or samples they used.
Happy mixing! Just make sure to follow the licenses attached to the works.
A week ago I had the chance to participate in a wonderful workshop on sound design given by David Strang. First, he gave the lecture “Surface Sounds” about his works. Then, in his workshop, he showed how to solder a contact microphones and make hydrophones (for underwater recording) and we went out to get some grips on the devices. Lecture, workshop and exhibition came to an invitation by Petra Klusmeyer. It really was good fun, and apart from that his inspiration made me to get an Arduino after all.
I got an Arduino Uno (R2) in a kit with some LEDs and other stuff so that I could immediately start with examples from the internet. A flashing LED, a dimming LED and the like. I got it fed electricity via USB but it takes away a lot of physical freedom. So I decided to practice my DIY abilities and soldering skills. I spent 2€ on a switch and a battery adapter and did some happy soldering. Notice on the picture (below, right) that one could have gotten away with less soldering, a recall to don’t drink and solder.
From cheap parts (left) to something handy (right)
The kit had an LED with RGB connections. That is what most intrigued me from the start. After I understood well how to connect the wires I put the LED on a cable to attach it on my finger. With a very simple digital photo camera that has a longest exposure time of 2 seconds I wanted to take stills of the moving light with changing colours. I programmed the Arduino to flash a sequence that repeats every 2 seconds. The code is not beautiful nor flexible yet but it does the job (I might actually put the code as a comment to the post).
Pressing the camera button at the right moment I got a few nice pictures taken.
The Ring of Fire
A friend
A Smoke
As a mostly autodidactic musician the concepts off scales, intervals, chords or rhythms can be quite mixed up, so when you work together with others it can get a bit complicated sometimes. Reading one’s way through encyclopaedias is lengthy, so I find it nice to find a book about all that, where knowledgeable people explain the whole picture. One place for such is certainly wikibooks. Users are working on a book on Music Theory since something like 2004 and it has gained quite a size. I was happy to see chapters on
Some other chapters are still quite short and need our efforts to be as good as the two mentioned ones.
Happy reading and extending!
Sometimes it’s really hard to find just that piece of information one needs to get done with the work. Searching a program’s homepage, looking around in the uncountable forums or playing with the settings can be very time consuming. On one of that journeys I passed by a site which I have seen before but did not remember: http://en.flossmanuals.net/ – “Free manuals for free software”. Concerning music making I was happy to see the new Ardour manual and an Audacity manual.
There are many more documents about streaming, video editing and graphic design software, general Linux commands and other. The site is nicely made, very appealing to the eye and comes as well in other languages than English, however not all of the manuals are translated. Maybe YOU want to supply one?
A screenshot from the FLOSS manuals main page.
After my euphoria from installing smasher without any problems I had some time to try out this very nice audio toy. It comes with some help, although it won’t explain everything. However, one easiely recognizes what is going on. What I didn’t realize before installing it was that smasher is not (hopefully yet) designed for live usage. So one can not synchronize playback with other programs (at least I didn’t know how to) and I couldn’t change slicing during playback. When smasher choked on something one cannot reconnect to the jack server. Alltogether it’s a very nice piece of software. One can prepare great loops with nice effects and save them to a wav. Thank you developers.
I have to add another note to my former post. When I installed it on my second machine, running as well on Ubuntu 8.04, it didn’t want to work straight away. On startup smasher said:
smasher: /usr/lib/libwx_gtk2u_aui-2.8.so.0: \
version `WXU_2.8.9' not found (required by smasher)
It turned out that some updates from this library are not included in Ubuntu. Adding apt.wxwidgets.org to the package sources list (see) lets you update to the needed version from the wxwidget developers page.
For a time now I was looking for an open source beat-slicer. I came across Smasher reading Dave Phillips’ latest article on linuxjournal.com, always a good read by the way. As he does a review on it in his article and I just installed it ten minutes ago, I will not bother you by another review.
As he points out, Smasher needs a variety of libraries to be built. Trying to compile it, I bumped into an error in wrapsound.cpp a few times, until I realized that from the same sourceforge page one can download a package smasher-1.1.6-ubuntu_i386.deb. It worked without problems for me on Ubuntu 8.04.
Then I started up Smasher and to my full delight it played the example file back as well straight to alsa as through a jack-server. So I’m quite excited about trying it out…
snapshot from smasher.sourceforge.net
Audacity is a free program, no need to give your email to anyone. Better download directly from its home on sourceforge!
It’s a well known program with GPLicense for recording and editing sounds. There is plenty of links on the internet on how to use it. However, it always takes some time to find the answer to special questions so I will document here on my experiences.
basic recording
I run Audacity using jack. To hear my source (e.g. MiniDisc) although I’m not running anything else I connect system-in and system-out directly. I switch to Audacity and use a new empty project. When the record button is pressed (or key “r”) Audacity automatically sets up two jack audio input channels and reads system-in. The level meter goes with the flow and blue lines on the meter mark the highest peak of the recording. One easily sees if the signal level was too high.
Then most probably one wants to save the recording. New name and so on…
editing
… saved. From now on, when I change my project, I can save it under the given name with CTRL+S. Nothing unusual so far. Funnily one can provoke a rather strange “error” here, which confused me for quite a while. Sometimes it says: “Disallowed for some reason. Try selecting some Audio first?” You maybe think about it and press OK, then you think you’d better save it again and the same message comes up. What it actually wants to say is: “There were no changes made to save. So I cannot do what you asked me for”. One can see, that the save entry in the file menu is disabled!
Saving a project leaves a file called project.aup and a directory with the name project_data.
listening
SPACE starts playback always at the marker (fine black line, NOT where the cursor is) and SPACE stops it again. A new playback will start at the marker and not where you stopped it. The marker can be set by clicking with the selection tool (F1) into the sample. When you mark a region by dragging the mouse-click along the sample, playback stops at the left end. SHIFT+SPACE will start looping playback on the selected region. The marker can be moved a little with the LEFT and RIGHT keys, it jumps to the beginning with HOME and to the END.
Audacity: The selection tool is for marking ranges or moving the marker line. The blue lines in the audio level meter show the highest peaks during the last playback.
It seems that the binary packages of jack-rack (an effect rack for jack) of some (ubuntu) distributions are compiled without a certain library. If this is the case one can not save or load the jack-rack presets, a rather annoying feature. In the discussions of ubuntu bugs site launchpad I found the solution. It says: “In order for this thing to work, Jack Rack has to be compiled with libgnomeui-dev installed in the system. …”
This is a short message informing that I plugged a M-Audio Axiom 25 MIDI controller into the USB port and it was recognised immediately. Sooperlooper, Specimen, JackRack, Hydrogen… perfect. I didn’t yet figure out how the transport buttons work. The manual is telling me weird stuff…
(as of Ubuntu 8.04, 2.6.24-23-rt)
Photo of the M-Audio Axiom 25 MIDI controller.
To use LADSPA effects in ARDOUR projects one can just add one from the list by double-clicking in the field above the volume control in the mixer panel. But sometimes you want to use the same effect on different tracks or mix the original with the effect. If there is no Dry/Wet-mix control in the effect plug-in the latter can be done via SEND-effects. Adding the same effect to different tracks through a SEND plug-in, CPU usage is smaller than adding it to every single track. Although, once you know how it works it is quite straightforward, but I struggled a lot getting it to work.
To do so one adds a bus to the mixer panel. Then a SEND plugin is chosen by right-clicking in the effect field of the desired audio track. This plug-in can be attached to another track or bus where one can add effects in the usual way. The important trick which finally does the job and which took me a while to figure out is to activate the SEND connection in its context menu.by right-clicking on it. In the menu you find a activate command.
From now on all pre-fader signals from the chosen track go into the chosen bus where effects can be added. Pre fader means that you can change the volume of the original track (or even turn it down to mute) and he signal is still received by the effect bus. If the SEND is added into the field below the volume control it is a post fader send and the signal goes to the effect bus filtered.
The picture shows the mixer panel with an actived SEND plugin (pre-fader) in an audio track. The levels of Bus 3 show that the signal is received.
